Emailing the CFTC

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has identified 30 areas in the Dodd-Frank Act where the CFTC will conduct rulemakings. In an effort to accommodate public input prior to the formal rulemakings, the CFTC has set up electronic mailboxes for 29 of the 30 areas. The only one without a mailbox is the Retail Off-Exchange Foreign Currency area because the public comment period for that proposed rulemaking has already closed. The other areas and their related email addresses are listed in the attached notice and fall into the following broad categories: Definitions and Standards; Clearing; Trading; Data; Particular Products (e.g. swaps and security-based swaps); Enforcement; Position Limits; and Other Titles and General Comments.
 

Getting Started

Since the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act on July 21, 2010, the agencies charged with implementing the Act have begun laying the groundwork for managing their new responsibilities.

The Department of Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Michael Barr provided a window into the action during his remarks to the Chicago Club yesterday. The first meeting of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) – the council of financial regulators charged with managing systemic risk – will be in September. The Treasury is currently working to stand up the new Office of Financial Research that will support the FSOC by collecting and analyzing data pertaining to systemic risk. Internationally, Treasury is working to raise capital requirements – the ratios and the quality of the underlying capital – and also institute explicit, quantitative liquidity requirements. According to Barr, the Dodd-Frank reforms also require that, “Regulators must supplement existing approaches to supervision with mandatory ‘stress tests,’ credit exposure reporting, and ‘living wills,’ so that they can adequately assess the potential impact of the activities and risk exposures of these firms on each other, on critical markets, and on the broader financial system.”

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